Monday September 6th, 1999

Also, Yung-Fong writes, "...one of the feature we have included in mozilla since M9 (but does not turn on by default) is charset detection for Japanese and Russian users (the ones for Korean and Chinese are not mature yet). Please refer to [this] document for more info. I am also working on a better UI for this feature in M11."

This post and the previous one regarding translation tools are yet another example of how the "outside" development community is contributing substantially to the Mozilla project. Even if they aren't contributing code, they're contributing time, tools, and translations that will greatly expand the reach of Mozilla.

Once Mozilla is out, and the translations are finalized, it would be interesting to see Mozilla expanded upon to provide a simple and free mechanism for anyone, be they teachers, government officials or workers, to write instruction manuals and texts using a localized template-based tool. The foundations for such a tool are already in the code - XUL, for creation of the interface; "Composer" for WYSIWYG editing; Javascript and DOM Level 1, for creating a simple site-management tool; and the new Necko networking library, which would simplify the creation of an FTP tool for site management. This could give even the most cash-strapped of developing countries the ability to disseminate information that meets the needs of their people, without having to invest in expensive English-centric software tools.